I am an avid reader - I enjoy turning pages. There is something about the feel of paper under the fingers when I'm reading.
That is for novels where I want to experience an interesting story. If I wanted it interactive I would watch a movie.
On the other hand when I want a textbook rarely would I prefer a paper version over a searchable reference. I am reading it mostly for information and I'll already have a vague idea what to look for.

I adore words, but let's face it: books suck. More specifically, so many beautiful ideas have been helplessly trapped in physical made-of-atoms books for the last few centuries. How do books suck? Let me count the ways: They are heavy. They take up too much space. They have to be printed. ...

My company uses a similar method where the total number of items ("Results") are known we output page "placeholders" when a users stops scrolling at one of these placeholders we go and get that page worth of results and replace the pageholder.
We know ahead of time how many results per page and we have a strict size per result so the placeholders have a height set at the same height the results would be (approx).
This fixes the scroll bar issue and only loads up what the user wants to see.

What do you do when you have a lot of things to display to the user, far more than can possibly fit on the screen? Paginate, naturally. There are plenty of other real world examples in this 2007 article, but I wouldn't bother. If you've seen one pagination scheme, you've seen them all. The...